Today I Met a Man Who Knows What Freedom Is

MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE—On a gemlike autumn afternoon, Julius Lakatos leaned on his cane at the edge of the crowd waiting for the Hillary Rodham Clinton road show to come up the hill between the blazing, vivid trees that ring the quadrangle of St. Anselm's College. Julius came to the United States in 1990 from Romania for a job as an ironworker. "I was with both of them in the primary," he said. "I like both of them, but I am now Hillary. It is good that they work together.

"I was also 30 years living in Communism, and I know that Trump would be a big danger for this country."

There has been a lot of talk about the authoritarian poison that the Republican nominee for president has injected into our politics this year, and damned few ideas about how it might be flushed out beyond making sure that a vulgar talking yam is not elected president, which seems a rather low bar for an advanced democracy, but there you are. Julius' fears are not imaginary. They are not extrapolations from the garishly undemocratic rhetoric in which the Republican nominee for president trafficks. They are not simply the other side of the argument. Julius Lakatos has seen the genuine article, and he has fought against the genuine article, so when he says he sees a dictator in Trump, his words carry far more weight than do the speculations of 1,000 pundits.

Getty ImagesJustin Sullivan

In 1989, what was then called the Soviet bloc in eastern Europe was falling apart largely because its great patron to the east was falling apart at an even faster clip. Poland had Solidarity and Czechoslovakia had its Velvet Revolution. Walesa and Havel were burrowing at the foundations of implacable and faceless tyranny. Even East Germany, the most implacable and faceless of them all, was starting to come apart. But those were largely peaceful revolutions. In Romania, it was a different story.

Among the ethnic Hungarians in Timosoara, the revolutionary spirit of the times broke out against the regime of the truly monstrous Nicolae Ceaucescu and his dreaded secret police, the Securitate. In the middle of December, Timasoara exploded and then so did the rest of the country. The military changed sides. Ceaucescu and his wife tried to flee, but they were captured. On Christmas Day, they were executed on orders of a military tribunal working on behalf of the new democratic government, which then immediately abolished the death penalty.

Julius Lakatos was in the streets during that remarkable December. "In Transylvania, where I was," he said. "We knew what had been done by the system to human rights, to freedom. We organized to get rid of the dictator. The only way to do it was to start revolution. We had to fight him and then we had to find him. He was in Bucharest, in a tank. That's where we had to find him.

"I was young and never afraid to fight for my rights, and for my freedom."

God, those words are tossed around so easily by people who have never encountered anything more dictatorial than a line at the DMV or being put on hold by the local water department. Lining up behind the Republican nominee is a whole rat's nest of people who believe that they are oppressed by speech codes, by background checks on firearms, and by Michelle Obama's telling them to eat more broccoli. Their pitiful mewling about refreshing the Tree of Liberty looks like the tantrums of children compared to the story that Julius Lakatos tells. He stood, leaning on his cane, his red brushcut as bright as the leaves above him, and cheered as the road show unfolded on the stage in front of him.

There is an enormous and contagious confidence in how the HRC campaign is operating now. (Andrea Mitchell is already fretting about the campaign's "overconfidence.") On Monday, they rolled Senator Professor Warren out, as well as Governor Maggie Hassan, currently running against Warren's distinguished colleague, Kelly Ayotte. SPW spent several minutes lighting Trump on fire. She as much as lined him up as the rapist in a revenge-drama.

"He thinks that, with a mouthful of tic-tacs, he can force himself on any woman he wants. Well, Donald, nasty women have really had it with the likes of you. Nasty women are tough, nasty women are smart, and nasty women vote. We nasty women are gonna walk our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever."

Beyond that, however, and in a departure from the clubby collegiality of the Senate, Warren hung Trump around Ayotte's neck like a lead fishing weight. This is going to be something of a theme all over the country as the campaign careers toward its end.

"Donald Trump called Latinos rapists and murderers. Kelly stuck with him. Trump called African-Americans thugs and Kelly stuck with him. Trump attacked a Gold Star family and Kelly stuck with him. Trump compared himself to dictators and praised Vladimir Putin and Kelly stuck with him. Trump even attacked Kelly Ayotte and called her weak and Kelly stuck with him.

"He sure can make her dance. But Donald Trump was right. Kelly Ayotte is weak."

If nothing else, the Clinton campaign is going to be remembered among America's political scientists as the textbook example of getting out of the way, watching your opponent sink, and handing him an anvil. Warren gets under his epidermal papyrus more easily than practically everyone else, as even HRC pointed out when she got up to speak. "I could listen to Elizabeth Warren all day," HRC said. They are, of course, two political allies who seem bound to collide at some point on the issues regarding the economy and, specifically, on the issues having to do with the relations between the government and the country's large financial institutions, something that HRC seemed to acknowledge on Monday by trying to take some of the fire out of it. Theirs is going to be a fascinating relationship going forward.

Getty ImagesJustin Sullivan

"Now, Elizabeth Warren has a track record of making it her mission to stand up against Wall Street," Clinton said. "She's going to make sure Wall Street never wrecks Main Street again. But you may not know that she was the person behind setting up the agency that protects consumers. And it was set up to protect against the kind of fraud and abuse that we've seen from Wells Fargo.

"You know, I think it's fair to say that some of the best TV you can see is on C-SPAN when Elizabeth is going after a bank executive or a regulator. She's refusing to let them off the hook, and she's not just speaking for herself, is she? She's speaking for every single American who's frustrated, and who's fed up, and I am so looking forward to working with her to rewrite the rules of our economy to make sure we both grow it and make it fairer for every single person working hard here in America.

"You know, we're up here without our phones, so we don't know what's happening on Twitter, but I'm sure when he finds out what she said, he'll be tweeting away. She gets under his thin skin like nobody else."

For all the blithering about "freedom," and for all the faint tread of the distant jackboots, both of which have made up the soundtrack of this most fevered of modern American presidential campaigns, the election is for the moment shaping up as a demonstration of some kind of faith in the sturdiness of American institutions, the ones that Julius Latakos looked at from afar when he was fighting a real battle to overthrow a real dictator. He knows what freedom is, better than do all the speechifying pols and all the idiots in camo running around in the woods chockful of whatever testosterone substitute Alex Jones is pitching there days.

Julius Lakatos recognizes freedom because once, against all odds, he reached out and grabbed for it. He stood in the crowd on Monday and cheered.

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